This chapter provides a brief reference for the general methods, properties, and events available to most HTML and XML elements in the Gecko DOM.

Various W3C specifications apply to elements:

DOM Core Specification—describes the core interfaces shared by most DOM objects in HTML and XML documents

DOM HTML Specification—describes interfaces for objects in HTML and XHTML documents that build on the core specification

DOM Events Specification—describes events shared by most DOM objects, building on the DOM Core and Views specifications

Element Traversal Specification—describes the new attributes that allow traversal of elements in the DOM tree
New in Firefox 3.5

The articles listed here span the above and include links to the appropriate W3C DOM specification.

While these interfaces are generally shared by most HTML and XML elements, there are more specialized interfaces for particular objects listed in the DOM HTML Specification. Note, however, that these HTML interfaces are "only for [HTML 4.01] and [XHTML 1.0] documents and are not guaranteed to work with any future version of XHTML." The HTML 5 draft does state it aims for backwards compatibility with these HTML interfaces but says of them that "some features that were formerly deprecated, poorly supported, rarely used or considered unnecessary have been removed." One can avoid the potential conflict by moving entirely to DOM XML attribute methods such as getAttribute().